Former POW Richardson lived an accomplished life

By Mary Mills Heidbrink, Staff Writer

Published
1:33 am CDT, Sunday, May 21, 2017

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Former POW Richardson lived an accomplished life

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Edgar Leo “Ed” Richardson, who was shot down over Germany during World War II and spent almost two years as a prisoner of war before returning home to raise a family and become a successful businessman, died April 29 at 94.

Raised on an Illinois farm during the Depression, Richardson left home early on to help ease the burden on his parents.

At 18, Richardson was living in a boxcar in Chicago when he joined the Army in 1940 to get regular meals.

“He saw a recruiter who told him, ‘You join the Army, you have a bed … and three meals a day,’” son Don Richardson said.

Accepted into the Army Air Corps, Richardson was trained as a navigator on a B-17 Flying Fortress bomber.

He and his crew were flying over Germany in 1943 when their plane was hit. Everyone except Richardson was killed.

“He pushed his parachute out the window, climbed out and put it on and landed in the middle of a German runway,” Rodriguez said.

Memories of the incident never left him.

“They were his friends and he watched them die,” Don Richardson said. “In his 90s, he still woke up with nightmares about being shot down.”

Placed in solitary confinement at first, Richardson was later housed with other POWs at a camp in Germany.

“He spent his 21st birthday in there,” Rodriguez said.

“It was very difficult to get him to talk about it,” she added. “He did tell me he sold his class ring from high school for a loaf of bread.”

Released from the camp at the end of the war, Richardson returned home and married just months later.

He’d already met his bride while on leave in 1941.

“When we started dating, I was in high school, then he went overseas,” said his wife, Adeline Richardson. “We wrote back and forth the whole time. When he came back, we knew we loved each other, and married.” The couple’s marriage spanned 71 years.

In 1945, Richardson left what was to become the Air Force but re-enlisted about five years later, receiving flight training at Kelly AFB before going on to make transport flights during the Korean and Vietnam wars.

With a strong belief in education, Richardson took an opportunity to earn a bachelor’s degree from St. Mary’s University while stationed in San Antonio in the late 1950s.

He also worked with St. Mary’s to provide education to his fellow servicemen.

“He almost single-handedly talked (the school) into coming to Kelly and providing classes at night,” Rodriguez said.

Among his many assignments, Richardson was a design engineer for the C-5 Galaxy transport in the 1960s.

“He was very brilliant in math,” Don Richardson said. “He could do everything … by hand or in his head.”

Retiring from the Air Force as a lieutenant colonel in 1969, Richardson opened his own stock brokerage firm in Illinois before buying and running a nursing home for a time.

He moved to San Antonio in 1974 — he and his wife had long planned to move here eventually — and began selling real estate for home-building giant Ray Ellison, becoming a multimillion-dollar salesman within a year.

Advancing quickly in the company, Richardson worked for Ellison for many years before leaving to build custom homes in the Windcrest area.

Opening Richardson Lighting on San Pedro Avenue in the early 1990s, Richardson also served on the Windcrest City Council in the early 2000s.

“He could never sit down,” Don Richardson said. “He built the house he and my mother live in when he was 70 years-old … retired completely at 91 and … at 94 he still drove.”